Flickr/Japanexperterna.se
On 7 September, the Science Museum in South Kensington was the setting for a presentation from BBC Director-General Lord Hall, the showing of a glitzy video, the distribution of a 99-page BBC positioning document and a supporting speech from Professor Brian Cox, mainstay of much BBC science output. All can be found on the BBC website. My advice is to ignore the speeches and read the document, right to the last pages, which set out (for those with sufficient attention span) the BBC’s version of how all the planned changes over the next five years will affect the BBC’s financial position. There is a major sting in the tail, which I will explain later!
As usual with these documents, the 99 pages contain a good deal of special pleading, faulty logic, chest-beating and blatant distortions of the BBC’s own history. I won’t bother with spelling all these out, as there is actually some impressive material which deserves attention once the flim-flam is ignored.
